Category: indie

“Completely addictive from first listen, it’s a dollop of outlandish, blurred-barrier pop, akin to early 1975 or even MGMT’s first album”. Clash

Gid Sedgwick has already featured on BBC Introducing and has received rave reviews from both Clash and EQ Music, so we’re assuming there’s no smoke without fire. Like vultures round a carcass, the signs of the indie press frantically gathering around a new act is as good a barometer of the musical climate as you can get. So what exactly is going on?

Gid is a UK-based singer-songwriter who is nearer to a one-man band than a gloomy strummer of a guitar, with a sound that picks up from 1975 and Goldfinger. The future, it seems, is trippy, gritty and catchy and shows UK indie as a cutting-edge force in a way that has been absent for years. Check out the video to his debut single, Ochos, here:

From the rainy remoteness of Vancouver come Broken Islands, who combine the ruggedness and starkness of their surroundings with an intensity and burning rage which results in one of the most arresting debuts in the last twelve months.

Lead track, “No-one Left to Kill” perfectly encapsulates the blitzkreig of their sound: from the innocuous spiky keys of the introduction; to the fuzzy burr of the churning guitar to singer; to Rachelle Boily’s primal cries, it’s the kind of track which feels like you’ve been lured in and then violently ambushed. The slow build (the introduction is a full minute, offering no suggestions of malice) but by the time the thick end of 4 minutes is up, you feel like you’re watching a collapsing ice shelf crash into an ocean of blood. It’s fascinating, awe-inspiring but ultimately slightly frightening…this is a good thing.

Anyone can write a love song. There can scarcely be a lazier concept, mired by even lazier tropes and lazier audiences lapping it up. To write something which causes alarm, intrigue and concern is a tremendous thing – to use sound in whatever form to conjure up such unique feelings is a true skill. Broken Islands, with one track alone, can remind you what music can be and what power it holds. You can explore the album for further enlightenment for yourselves – no spoilers.

Cholesterol Jones, an artist with a winning name and a winning mentality. Not for Cholesterol the by-numbers acoustic indie gravy train – instead, his sound is somewhere vaguely near country, folk and alt-pop, as likely to have sprung from 1965 as 2017…and all the better for it.

Taken from the EP of the same name, “Satan’s in Heaven” is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek dig at Donald Trump and his supporters, though that undermines the deftness of the musical content. The accompanying video is an artistic triumph, the perfect mixture of dayglo laughs and acerbic criticism.

Cholesterol was born on a US army base in Bavaria before moving to Boston, where he spent his formative years. After a period of twenty years living in New York City, he now splits his time between London, Boston and Cape Cod, his observations of the world around him keener than ever. Drawing on influences including Dwight Yoakam and Johnny Cash, there are also elements of the more eclectic end of the popular music spectrum – dashes of Squeeze; splashes of Luna; portions of They Might be Giants. Clever lyrically but with hooks galore.

Cholesterol has played live at such legendary venues as LA’s Whiskey-A-Go-Go and Soho’s 12-Bar Club, though has now dedicated himself to the studio and film-making. The live scene’s loss is humanity’s gain, the campaign to make Cholesterol Jones president starts here.

If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear that there were at least four people playing on this, Pink Milk’s debut album, Purple. In fact, there are but two, Maria Forslund (vocals, drums) and Edward Forslund (guitars, bass), both of whom use every effects pedal they can to tweak up the volume that extra notch and get it to echo that little longer.

Opener, “River Phoenix”, sets the scene perfectly – ice-cold moodiness with the threat of malevolent showers, there are no words but the intention is clear. Appropriately, their muscles are flexed further on “Muscles”, Mariah’s breathy tones swooping over enormous guitar chords and a slowly stomping dinosaur footstep of a drum beat.

“Detroit” sees Pink Milk at their version of breakneck speed, which is any other guitar band’s slow number being played at 33rpm instead of 45rpm. The accompanying video is a nice counterpoint to the track – hazy and happy, yet oddly haunting. “Kill 4 U”, perhaps the strongest track on the album, has a Depeche Mode-esque dark majesty to it, the guitar work is genuinely thrilling, showcasing an instrument taken for granted but still capable of astonishing.

“LA Cop” is something of a welcome instrumental pause for breath – the echoes suggest huge amounts of space, yet the overall sound is strangely claustrophobic. “Awakening of Laura” is pushed out of the way quickly by “Sushi Dreams (Flesh & Blood)”, which is every bit as terrifying as it looks on paper – in fact, although causal listeners will point fingers excitedly at My Bloody Valentine and The Cranes as precursors, this reminded me very much of electro-rock innovators, Chrome, and their starkly cruel thrash.

“Drommens Skepp” and “Sans Toi” pick up the pace yet further, really bringing the tracks together as an album, as opposed to a collection of assembled, random tracks. It feels like the whole album has been dragging us towards something; which, in turns out, it has. Their cover of Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love is” is a slap around the face of the band’s AOR chops and reinvents it as a mournful, epitaph-like statement. Purple takes time to fall in love with but the effort is well worth the investment.

Steampunk must be one of the most inclusive, inoffensive culture movements since the 60s. There don’t appear to be any factions; it continually evolves; its fans come both genders and all ages. How does everyone else get it so wrong? Now music has joined the scene, the Steampunk Record Label featuring a wide range of bands from an impressively diverse spectrum of styles and sounds.

Although the punkier end of the spectrum is particularly well-catered for, there’s everything from cabaret; grimey swamp-rock; garage rock; lightshows and burlesque artists featured – not so much “something for everyone” something “something for anyone with good taste”. There are now only four dates left to catch one of the year’s best value nights out – see bands, locations and dates below, grab your goggles and join the party!

According to the press release, Mavis Victory Project are an indie band, though their latest release, “Don’t Go Away”, is stretching the term to its very limits. Most of all we feel sorry for the one member who isn’t actually related to the other four – exactly how picked on do you reckon he must be? But back to the music – like we say, this is indie as in ‘independent’, but if you’re expecting guitars and hooks, you’re going to be disappointed.

“Don’t Go Away” is the weird destination trip-hop has reached when everyone ignored it for the last few years. It crept, unseen, into a weird cellar populated by hooded weirdos, hot girls and strange cultists (is there any other kind?) and it’s matured quite nicely thankyouverymuch. The video, which features the aforementioned cast, is as strangely angular as the music – unlovable but edgy and alluring. We still can’t decide if it’s genius or madness. Have a look and a listen: